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No More Apple Mysteries Part Two
UltimaGuy writes "Anadtech has an article up comparing the IBM G5 with Intel's CPU. This gives us insight on the strength and weakness of Mac OS X. It also has some thoughts of what they perceive to be OS X's Achilles Heel." From the article: "That is what we'll be doing in this article: we will shed more light on the whole Apple versus x86 PC, IBM G5 versus Intel CPU discussion by showing you what the G5 is capable of when running Linux. This gives us insight on the strength and weakness of Mac OS X, as we compare Linux and Mac OS X on the same machine. The article won't answer all the questions that the first one had unintentionally created. As we told you in the previous article, Apple pointed out that Oracle and Sybase should fare better than MySQL on the Xserve platform. We will postpone the more in-depth database testing (including Oracle) to a later point in time, when we can test the new Apple Intel platform." This is the sequel to another article, reported on in June.
Apple didn't choose AMD for a couple big reason. One of them was given by Steve Jobs when he announced the transition - Intel's roadmap offers better performance per watt of power than AMD or IBM can. Because laptops are taking a greater marketshare than desktops, it only makes sense for Apple to have a portable chip that produces the most bang for the least amount of power.
The other issue is fab capacity. AMD doesn't have the capacity that Intel does. Apple got burned more than once by a lack of chips coming from Freescale/IBMs fabs. They do not want to go through that again, and AMD has trouble delivering large volumes of their top-of-the-line processors. They've gotten better, but Apple doesn't want to be held back by a lack of fab capacity.
I use AMD for Windows and Linux, but Apple's business plan makes Intel the best fit for their future directions.
Given that the Mac community are more concerned over Photoshop than databases its not really suprising that they haven't concentrated massively on transactionally written files (lots of small writes) and may have chosen to focus on optimizing the writing of big files and the maths and graphics processing that goes with graphics work.
More and more I consider the "Mac users are primarily photoshop users" to be somewhat of a strawman. I work at a Java shop, and many of our programmers, myself included, use Macs. So does our change management guy and much of netops. Yes, the graphics designers use Macs, but Macs are used throughout the company by many people for different reasons.